st: Re: _merge

on 26/08/2003 11:24 am, Dr. Frederick Wolfe at fwolfe@arthritis-research.org
wrote:
> In agreement with Nick, the program does work as directed. However, a
> case should be made against the long held Stata position that _merge is
> inviolable.
I think that Stata's position on _merge goes slightly to their normal stance
of treating users as 'all grown up now'. A user who knows what they are
doing can use options like clear, replace, stepwise, noconstant, to do
things that may or may not be wise. The documentation tries to guide, but
not to force.
Merge is a rare exception - the only other one I can think of is -encode-,
which logically should have a 'replace' option.
So, for consistency, shouldn't we be able to specify that we don't want to
see the _merge variable?
Ronan M Conroy (rconroy@rcsi.ie)
Lecturer in Biostatistics
Royal College of Surgeons
Dublin 2, Ireland
+353 1 402 2431 (fax 2764)
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